Suet Pudding Shapes

Suet puddings come in two shapes: spherical and cylindrical. The spherical type is made by laying a pudding-cloth inside a basin, lining it with suet paste, filling it, and then adding a lid of more paste and knotting the cloth over the top— loosely, to avoid the rising paste bursting the cloth. The cylindrical type is made from a flat sheet of paste usually spread with filling and rolled up (see roly-poly pudding), but it is less easy to tie the cloth around a pudding of this shape. Now that the pudding-cloth is obsolescent, spherical puddings are made in a basin covered with foil and greaseproof paper; and cylindrical rolls are often baked (a treatment which is anyway traditional for some).